http://isiforums.net/f/showthr ... 3-Dream-Big-Dream-Outerra

Apparently from im reading. Its a planetary engine in development thats capable of taking laser scan data and rendering it to 1:1 scale down to every little detail in the road. So all those people who want Nordschliefe. You would not only get it, but you would also get the surrounding country roads. You would get the city streets past those country roads.

The entire earth is supposedly covered in this engine as well as 2.2 billion miles into space. Now theres only 3 textures at the moment. Dirt, grass, and snow and one tree model.

Official site http://www.outerra.com/wfeatures.html

Sounds like google earth on steroids. But so mcuh steroids to the point where you can fly and drive around in it.

Yes please, think of the infinite variety of fictional and real street courses you could build, a true sandbox racing simulator?

May be true what some people are saying though that the engine may be better suited to wargames and flight sims, unless of course a proper car physics model can be implemented, which I don't doubt at all.

It's using fractals to make up the details though, so it's not accurate at more than a large scale. The best DEM data for the planet is still at several meter resolution. Great for making maps of counties and such, but not quite good enough for roads.

There's a few planetary engines about, but the strength of this one appears to be the fact that it can take many different data formats of varying granularity and use them all to enrich the basic fractal landscape.

Obviously, the entire planet's not detailed to <1cm resolution (haha, can you imagine the storage you'd need?) but the idea is you have a basic resolution of the whole world and add smaller resolution heightmaps as you see fit for local detail. With the Nordschleife example you'd get the 10m DEM data for the immediate area and with a bit of adjusting and tweaking of the details (I assume as it'd never *quite* line up) you can use your laser-scanned point cloud for the actual circuit.

I bet you will need one hell of a pc to run it.

Quote from Bob Smith :

It's using fractals to make up the details though, so it's not accurate at more than a large scale. The best DEM data for the planet is still at several meter resolution. Great for making maps of counties and such, but not quite good enough for roads.

this. i've tried using DEM maps for other games... it's okay for getting a general idea of ground topology, but if you wanted to use it for making a RL replicate, have fun smoothing out all the bumps.